


The Education of Monsieur Madeleine

by Floral_Murdock



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Schönberg/Boublil, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Art, Canon Era, Enlightenment Philosophy, Fanart, Gen, Les Mis Big Bang: Quarantine Edition, Missing Scene, OCs on OCs on OCs, References to Catholicism, Valjean's Self-Esteem Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:55:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24028492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Floral_Murdock/pseuds/Floral_Murdock
Summary: He's no longer Jean Valjean, but he doesn't know yet what he might be. Could books hold the answer?A look into the transformation from Valjean to Madeleine through what he reads.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14
Collections: Les Mis Big Bang: Quarantine Edition





	The Education of Monsieur Madeleine

He buried most of the silver in a copse of trees, around the side of the mountain.  
He could hardly walk around with a bagful of silver, lest he be dragged back before the police. The Bishop might be merciful, but they certainly were not.  
So he went into the sparse woods with a spade and a large sack upon his back. He walked until he no longer saw peasant women going to fetch water, or poor farmers with their carts. They eyed him with suspicion, and he eyed them back, though his hatred had mellowed into distrust tinged with a hint of interest. Who were they, these people with their open faces and respectable clothes? Had he been one of them, once? No, he’d been coarser, almost wild. Would he become one of them? He’d like to be. A simple country man with nothing to concern him but the market prices and the rain.  
He wandered up the mountain a good bit before he found an area he deemed sufficiently remote. He would have preferred a forest, but this little copse of scraggly pine trees would have to do. The sandy soil parted easily under his hands.  
He wondered what the Bishop would think of him now, digging in the dirt with his hands. He wondered if he’d see him for the animal creature he was. But no, the Bishop would probably say, God made the Earth with his own hands, and he who is close to it is close to God.  
The plates he sold in a shop that was just this side of respectable, though he couldn’t have said just which side it was on.  
The shopkeeper eyed Valjean warily as he walked in.  
“Hello Monsieur, what can I do for you today?”  
“I’m looking to sell this.”  
Valjean drew out four plates from under his coat. The rest of the silver lay hidden far underground, until he was ready to move on again.  
“Plated?”  
“I don’t know, Monsieur. It was my father’s.” It was as good a story as any. If questioned, he could say his father was a seventh son of a bourgeois family that had fallen on hard times during the revolution. Though his rough prison clothes made that out to be a lie.  
The shopkeeper simply held one of the plates up to the light experimentally. “Good quality. I’ll give you 14 Napoleons for the lot.”  
Fourteen Napoleons. He did the math in his head. One Napoleon was 20 Francs, fifteen twenties made 300, 300 minus twenty was 280. Two hundred and eighty francs. More than he had ever seen in one place.  
“Sold.”  
“Very good, Monsieur.”  
While the man counted out the coins, Valjean spotted an old, leather-bound book. Rousseau, the cover read in peeling gilt lettering. He opened it to a random page and started reading. It said something about man, and nature, and souls. He’d heard the name Rousseau before. Was he some sort of priest? Could reading, which he had learned in prison to spite the world, now hold the key to his soul?  
“How much for this?”  
“Six francs.”  
He handed the pile of coins, less six francs, to Valjean. The money in his hands made him feel every bit a thief.  
“Good day,” he said as he exited. The shopkeeper replied in turn. It was all he could do not to break out in a run once he reached the street.  
Two hundred and eighty francs. He’d never come close to having so much money. Two minutes in the shop had netted him more than nineteen years in prison.  
The inn in town was just down the street. It was a small, run-down wooden building, similar to the least reputable inn in Digne. However, it was notably more empty. There were only a couple of drinkers at a table by the window and a dark-haired woman stirring something in front of the fireplace.  
“May I help you, Monsieur?”  
“Hello, Madame. I’m passing through town, and I need a room for the night.”  
She turned around and eyed him as warily as the innkeepers of Digne had. His heart sank. But then she turned back to her pot.  
“Can you pay?”  
“Yes.” He showed her a gold Napoleon.  
Her eyes widened for half a second. “You can take the first room upstairs on the left.”  
He thanked her and went upstairs. It was cramped but well appointed, with a bed, a washbasin, and a little mirror.  
He looked at his reflection for a moment. He still looked like a hardened laborer at best, not at all the sort to go flashing gold coins in small country inns. She had every right to be suspicious.  
He opened the book he had bought, and tried to read from the beginning. Emile, or On Education, the first page read. The next had a second title: I. Emile. Underneath was the beginning of the the actual text: Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. Who was the Author of things? What things? Wasn’t anyone who wrote a book an author of something? Weren’t they all just men themselves?  
He tried to read on, but it was much the same. Weighty statements that seemed to mean a lot to the author, but little to him. By the time he made out what one part meant, he forgot how it connected to the section before.  
He set aside the book, frustrated. Mere Gardinier knocked at the door, and opened the door.  
“Supper, Monsieur.”  
He thanked her and followed her out. He sat down to dinner some distance from the small crew of drinkers, but not so far as to seem hostile. When Mere Gardinier finished serving them, she sat down across from him and looked at him seriously.  
“Are you planning to become a conventionist?”  
“What?”  
“Rousseau. The favorite philosopher of revolutionaries everywhere.”  
He looked at her, nonplussed. “I didn’t know anything about that. I can hardly make it though any of it, besides.”  
“Too bad, I rather like Rousseau myself. Terrible ideas about women, though.” One of the drinkers was pointing at another accusingly, yelling nonsense about some petty offense.  
“He says everything is perfect in nature, even humans. It’s a nice idea. Being out in the countryside certainly sounds nicer than being here with some of this lot.”  
She looked over at the men. The conflict had escalated into a full out argument, and it seemed ready to turn violence any moment.“They’re always looking for work in the fields. It’s not easy, but a strong man can always get work as a farmhand or a shepherd.”  
“Around here?”  
“There’s a larger village about a day’s walk away, where they have big farms for grain and fruit.” The first punch was finally thrown. Please excuse me, I must go deal with these men.” With that, she got up and walked away, leaving him with a good deal to consider.  
***  
He knelt down to look for grapes at the bottom of the vines. The sun beat down relentlessly, but he had a floppy hat to shield his face from the sun. His body ached a little when he stood, but it was the satisfying ache of mild exertion.  
The harvest had been historically bad. A drought had killed off much of the wheat crop. Already, there were talks of food shortages and men being laid off to offset the cost of manufacturing.  
There was a loud thump somewhere across the field. He ran toward the source of the noise.  
Under a tree stood a ragged, wild-eyed boy with a sack. From the size and stains on it, he’d guess the boy had bagged a rabbit or a couple squirrels. A poacher, then. Not even a thief.  
“Don’t get any closer.” The boy pulled out his hunting knife, but his hands were shaking.  
He sighed internally. The knife complicated everything.  
He raised his hands. “I won’t hurt you.”  
“You’ll turn me over to the foreman, though, and he’ll take me to the cops.”  
“Why should I? I didn’t see you take anything that didn’t belong to you. As far as I know, you’ve just wandered onto the farm by accident.”  
The boy’s eyes widened. He opened his mouth as if to say something, but no words came out.  
“Go quickly now, before someone else finds you.”  
The boy made a run for the woods, and disappeared into them like one of the trees.  
At the end of the day, he left the farm and walked back to town by himself. He stood awkwardly outside of the church.  
“Good day, Monsieur. Won’t you come in?” The priest was right behind him. He was a young man, fresh from seminary and probably young enough to be Valjean’s son. But there was the advantage of his still being young enough to care, and he seemed like he would grow into a comforting and wise presence. He visited a couple times a week outside service, even if he could say very little about what was actually going on.  
He followed the priest inside and sat with him in the refectory. “To what do I owe the visit?” the priest asked kindly.  
Valjean considered his words before he spoke. “I met a boy in the fields today. I might have let him steal our crop. I don’t know if it was right or wrong, but I couldn’t condemn him to starvation --- or worse, the police, He reminded me of someone I knew.”  
The priest gave him a look that suggested he knew exactly who “someone” was. “If they are living in God now, it doesn’t matter what that person might have done in the past. The grace of God is infinite.”  
He shook his head, almost involuntarily. He was suddenly struck by the idea that this priest might have been an infant when he first entered Toulon. “Have you known God your whole life?”  
The priest seemed taken aback. “Well, my parents were good people, and they raised me to be as good a Christian as they could. But I never really felt like I knew God until I was a little older, and I was faced with the issues of life and death that only God can solve.”  
“I didn’t know God until I was almost fifty years old, and even then I had to be led to Him by a truly christlike man. Before that, I was ignorant, and there was little but hate in my soul.”  
“But you turned away from hating. That’s a powerful thing.” The priest paused for a moment. “I want to help you let go of the guilt you carry, but I don’t know if I can. I have only the vaguest outline of your life before --- not that you’re obliged to tell me more,” he added quickly, “but our conversations come to a halt here fairly often. You seem stuck on your past.”  
“If I am stuck in the past, it’s because I see it everywhere here.” He realized it was true as he said it. The fields, the orchards, everything was exactly as it had been in another tiny village far away and many years ago. Every day, he saw something that was like “It may be time for me to move on to somewhere else.”  
“Please don’t let what I said, or what happened today, have too much influence over what you do in the long term. I would be sad to see you go after you’ve made a life here.”  
“It’s more than that. I’ve been considering it for awhile. It’s been a bad harvest, and men are going to be laid off. I would rather it were me than someone with a family, who needs the money more and can’t leave besides.”  
“Have you given any thought to what you might do, or where you might go?”  
“I was thinking about going to a town. Work might be more readily available, and it might be a change of pace to work in industry instead of on a farm.”  
“It might do you well. Somewhere by sea, perhaps.”  
“Perhaps.”  
“I will still be sorry to see you go, however. There’s been something I’ve been wanting to show you for awhile now.”  
The priest turned to a bookshelf and pulled out a slim printed pamphlet. The Lives of Saints, it read. “I know you’re familiar with the Bible, but I don’t know how much you know about those who tried to follow Jesus’s example after his death. I thought you might find some interest in this --- the saints, being human, were all fallible, just like you and I.” He looked straight at him now. “And some of the best saints were made out of the worst sinners.”  
Valjean pored over the book later that evening by the dim candlelight in his garret room. There was something comforting and disturbing about knowing how much the saints had suffered for their faith. Most of them were never marked for greatness from the start, and some were outright sinful before their faith was tested.  
There was one story in particular that impacted him. A woman who was a nonbeliever and sinner, who became one of the most ardent followers of Jesus during his lifetime.  
He told the foreman the next day that he would be leaving, and he could swear the man looked relieved. And when he arrived in M-Sur-M soon afterward, he told them his name was Madeleine.  
***  
The factory bell rang out across the floor. He finished twisting the clasp in place on the last necklace --- simple jet beads strung together, mourning jewelry --- and set it aside with the rest of the finished jewelry. Since they changed the means of closure, he noted with some satisfaction, production had nearly doubled.  
He said his goodbyes to the men in his section, and set off for the bookseller’s.  
He had more money than he needed every week for the little room he rented and the way he lived. He started to frequent the bookseller’s, which was just down the street from him and who delighted in his willingness to read whatever came across his path. And he did read everything: floras of domestic plants, weighty tomes of French history, pamphlets on scientific discoveries. This is what he imagined reading would be: all the information he could want opened up before him, and more he had never imagined existed. It began to feel vital to him. Sometimes, he wondered how he had lived for so long cut off from all those different universes contained in books.  
In the street just before the bookseller’s, a sound broke him out of his reverie. It was a dry, rattling cough. It was the kind of cough that meant death.  
There was a woman huddled against the wall between the printer’s and the bookshop, huddled up in graying rags. Behind her were two equally ragged children, staring empty-eyed at Madeleine.  
Immediately, Madeleine pulled out whatever money he had in his purse and offered it to the woman. It was enough for bread for three, at least.  
“Thank you, Monsieur,” she muttered without raising her head. The children just watched him pass, with the lethargic gaze of the starving.  
“May God help you.”  
He couldn’t pass by that kind of suffering without trying to help. Other people might, but they had families of their own to worry about. What did it mean for him to go without books, or even bread for a day, if it put someone a little farther from starvation?  
He reached his rooms in a daze, hardly knowing where he was going. When he unlocked the door, he paced from the door to the window to the desk to back.  
Madeleine couldn’t forget the shame in the woman’s voice, constantly exposed to the elements and the cold judgement of passersby. Even worse were the dead eyes of the children. There were no provisions for women left alone, no help even for the little children who certainly didn’t ask to be brought into such a world.. All three would more than likely starve to death in the streets, and all he could offer them was a few sous.  
He’d been down this line of thought many times before, and he knew it only led down into despair. He scanned his bookshelf instead. The only thing he hadn’t read was a slim green tome with peeling gilt lettering.  
He had kept the Rousseau all those years, unwilling to part with a book he’d never read. He always told himself he would try to read it again someday, but he could never shake the memory of how difficult it had been the first time.  
For a lack of other options, it seemed today would be the day he finally did just that. He pulled it off the shelf and sat down at the small table by his window.  
And this time, miraculously, it made sense.  
Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man. The people he saw huddled up in the street had the same inherent worth as any human (certainly as much as him: there but for the grace of God went Père Madeleine), but ended up at the very bottom of the social order because the world beat them down since birth.  
Powerful men didn’t move to help the very lowest. They simply wished for them not to exist. No one tried to help the poorest, for they had convinced themselves that poverty and ignorance were the natural lot of some people.  
But their suffering could be ameliorated. Poverty was a condition of society, not some moral flaw of the individual. He’d seen proof of that all too often.  
Those who found themselves in poverty could be raised up. Children could be educated, to abolish ignorance and give them a chance at a better life.  
He would see to it that it happened. He might not be able to save the woman and her children --- he couldn’t solve all the suffering in the world --- but he could do as much as possible to save others from the same fate. Somehow he could provide for women to be self-sufficient, see poor children educated.  
It was almost enough. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! Art by MagicFishHook/@iammagicfishhook on Tumblr, say hi to the author @lallouette on Tumblr.


End file.
